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 Unexpected collaboration of the year (Source: theonlinecitizen.com) About a week ago, Workers' Party secretary-general and recent leader of the opposition Pritam Singh addressed the India-Singapore Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (popularly known as CECA) in a Facebook post, denouncing the racism arising from its supposed (effectively) one-sided granting of (Bharat) Indian professionals access to local jobs*. This is clearly an entirely relevant topic for consideration, with race-based prejudice and xenophobia certainly unacceptable in Singapore's somewhat-fragile multicultural society. The far more interesting part was the concurrent mention of a recent sleeper hit movie from China, 《给阿嬷的情书》 (thereafter Dear You), which tells the story of a Teochew grandmother discovering the truth behind her long-running correspondence with her husband in Thailand. The original controversy over Dear You was due to the IMDA mandating that it be screened with a Mandarin dub, instead of its original Teochew, in line with Singapore's longstanding Speak Mandarin (and not dialect) campaign. This had some locals forced to cross the border to Johor to watch it undubbed, following which the authorities relented and allowed ten Teochew screenings, later extended to eighteen (and perhaps more) after overwhelming demand. There are several pertinent observations that might be made here. To begin with, Singh's referencing a suggestion that the "emotive Teochew blockbuster" is (PRC) propaganda may be somewhat of a head scratcher, given that his Workers' Party had basically survived mostly due to former leader Low Thia Khiang hanging on to the Hougang constituency as his base, after Indian political legend and previous head J. B. Jeyaretnam had basically been bankrupted by LKY** and other PAP members*** (but that one is totally not racist, ah!). It is somewhat difficult to understand how a Workers' Party chief can suddenly be against "emotive Teochew propaganda" given that he frankly owes his position to it to some extent - just sayin'. Didn't hear no complaints about dialects and ethnic loyalty then! Secondly, it has also been noted that there has generally been no issue with movies being screened in whatever tongue here, whether French, Spanish, Korean or Japanese etc.; indeed, various languages from India/Bharat have been freely represented in local cinemas, where one can take their pick of Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu or Punjabi films (some of which, I gather, have to be touching cross-national family dramas too, such as Amitabh Bachchan's classic Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham), with entirely zero comment from anybody. Thirdly, it is also entirely unclear as to why a Teochew film would be accused of being China propaganda, given that their promotion of (Standard) Mandarin over the literally hundreds of spoken dialects has generally been recognized (by the CCP's detractors, at least) to be a political device towards unification. From this reasoning, would not allowing the movie to be played - but only in Mandarin instead - be considered as being biased towards the CCP instead? Moreover, if two elderly women exchanging letters qualifies as "propaganda", what can one describe Captain America smashing up ethnically-ambiguous mobs while being literally wrapped in their flag, as? While I had stated that China may have a lot to learn about effective propaganda ops some days back, let me just add that I still believe in fair play: it's just bad manners to directly call one's competitors out when they have put in the work to improve, and honestly this doesn't help one's own development!  Green appears their official shirt colour for some reason... (Source: nikkei.com) In any event, this grandma pen-pal flick has somehow been described by Lianhe Zaobao as possibly China's perfect propaganda film alongside a flurry of other denigratory articles, which might be a sign of arms getting seriously twisted on the media backend (refer discussions on the prior language-based divison in local media, from 2022 to 2023). This has extended to the deputy editor-in-chief of the SPH Chinese Media Group describing the movie as "cognitive warfare" attacking local multiracial identity, and Zaobao going as far as to suggest that it was part of United Front (统战) tactics. Wait, is this the bad old days of the 1950s Malayan Emergency revisited? This by the way comes as our Senior Minister emphasized in Shanghai that Singapore's relationship with China is purely transactional and based on mutual self-interest, which suggests that the tussle over control is spreading right to the very top. The mainland Chinese media has certainly picked up on the issue, with Global Times claiming a twisting of narratives, and accusing critics of "inner demons" by drawing a contrast to Coco; why, it is asked, is Coco celebrated globally as a touching and uplifting story representing "universal feelings" for seeking ancestral roots, while Dear You is panned for "hidden intent"? Then again, Great America is probably correct to be wary of the power balance in the region, from how the GOD-EMPEROR TRUMP has just requested an advance on South Korea's warship deliveries, with his Commerce Secretary raising concerns on whether China has acquired an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine from the Netherlands, both issues that had very coincidentally been raised here recently - but the U.S. angle will have to wait for once, even if this saga does smell like a classic Western-flavoured identity politics campaign.  Dialect was never a problem for this series either [N.B. The Mandarin title (英雄无名) translates as "Heroes Nameless", which is clearly not the same as the English title of Ah Boys To Firemen - and doesn't even have a specific relation to firemen in particular. It may however reference a famous Gu Long wuxia novel (英雄无泪), the comic adaptation of which has been referenced multiple times here.] (Source: r/singapore) As a final remark before ending off, it could be noted that India and China have historically been the two largest civilizations through much of recorded history, and have accounted for more than half of the global population as recently as 1850, and still comprise over a third of the world today. Quite incredibly, across all those centuries, there has been next to no conflict**** between the two peoples, save for a couple of border skirmishes in the 1960s that ended with a few thousand dead - which should honestly qualify them as super best friends considering what has been going on elsewhere. The Chinese Foreign Minister's call for continued dialogue has by the way just come after America's admission that they will not let India develop into a rival like China, but one supposes that it will be entirely up to India as to how they want to play The Greatest Game... [*On the Micron job ad discussed a while back, a follow-up probe has had the company deny authorizing it... which however does not appear to address whether actual recruitment had occurred through the posting.] [**Who was no stranger to using dialect for votes.] [***Quite ironically, the final straw was JBJ getting sued because he implied in the party newsletter that local Tamil MPs had not been sincere enough in their efforts to promote the Tamil language, so it appears unclear as to whether mother tongues (re: Teochew) should indeed be supported or not.] [****Some part likely due to geography, on which more next time.] [To be continued...]
 Come on now, don't you trust me? (Sources: GPT Image 2, aninews.in, Google Books Ngram Viewer) The past few days has seen much commentary on America's latest Iran deal and geopolitics in general, including a pair of well-written commentaries in the national broadsheet, one of which introduced the Sanskrit Arthashastra as a contemporary treatise to Sun Tzu's probably more-famous The Art of War (as discussed last June). The analyses are well-considered, and I would beg to differ on only one point, specifically the assertion that "what Trump had embarked on was not strategy but recklessness" - which I believe should be revealed to be not entirely accurate quite soon. Case in point, the statement was predicated on Iran being "poised to extract sanctions relief and the unfreezing of its dollar assets", but as explained here some weeks back, the purported US$300 billion reconstruction fund (and related concessions) was an obvious troll from the start. Even disregarding that the "deal" was an entirely non-binding memorandum of (mis)understanding towards kicking the football-shaped can sixty days down the road, the GOD-EMPEROR TRUMP (with some help from Israel and Hezbollah) has already pulled the football away with a public declaration that Iran would "not (get) ten cents" - but really, if The specific phrasing by GEOTUS may be notable for its apparent uniqueness, with the expression more commonly heard as "not a penny/dime". This intuition is supported by an n-gram search, with the "penny" version remaining the most popular despite TRUMP discontinuing production (possibly to help drop the penny for his unenlightened detractors), followed by the resurgent dime, and then the dollar. "Not ten cents" was not found in the corpus - and thus might be accounted another TRUMP original coinage - and likewise for "not a nickel" and "not a quarter", despite their quantity in circulation being comparable to that of dimes at least. Well, as explained last month: if TRUMP took/gave the ten cents, the (Iran) game would be over!  It was inevitable, once one understands how The Game is played - Singapore does have one of the highest average I.Q.s in the world (Source: r/singapore) More Coinages Revisited And to follow up on recent posts, it had been questioned as to why the section on Musk's fortune had began with "Unto Elon AI" when SpaceX is a rocket and space exploration company (i.e. it's rocket science!), surely? Upon double-checking, the SpaceX S-1 filing for its IPO clearly states that the space-related portion of its business, including Starlink, is responsible for less than 7% of its value (some US$2.43 trillion, as of today). Instead, the majority of its worth is projected to come from "providing AI services in space", apparently by sending cloud servers into orbit, making Musk's conversion of his Tesla Roadster into a satellite circa 2018 something of a test drive. So yes, "Unto Elon AI" is accurate. This does raise the natural question as to why AI SERVERS IN SPACE is necessarily so much more valuable than simply planting them on terra firma (and just transmitting the signals to space). In particular, Amazon's AWS is the largest cloud provider on Earth with a revenue of about US$120 billion last year, but SpaceX has already overtaken them in market value despite a storage capacity of approximately zero, with a price-to-earnings ratio of -61, and a price-to-sales ratio of about 138, on a revenue of US$18.7 billion and a net loss of US$4.9 billion. This compares extremely unfavourably to its peers (the likes of NVIDIA, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon), all of whom are turning annual net profits from about US$77 to 132 billion, which has had pundits such as Michael Burry and Aswath Damodaran having qualms about SpaceX's valuation. It is not known as to what Warren Buffett (who was the world's richest as recently as 2008) thinks of it, but as Burry points out, SpaceX has just eclipsed Berkshire Hathaway more than twice over in just three days, with Elon Musk making more than Buffett's entire lifetime net worth in a single day. The acquisition of AI startup Cursor for US$60 billion (of stock) by SpaceX has done little to quell concerns thus far, with commentators realising that if SpaceX's current market cap of about US$2.43 trillion is entirely unjustified by conventional metrics... what is to prevent its market cap from ballooning to, say, US$10 trillion (or roughly a third of the U.S. GDP), given that the degree of absurdity would remain largely unchanged? As Elizabeth Warren and others have also noted, fast-tracking SpaceX onto the Nasdaq-100 index would further force buying by index investors such as hedge and pension funds, whatever the fund operators themselves think of SpaceX itself. Given this, we can only return to the explanation from last week, and revisit the original question of what SpaceX is: is it a rocket, social media or AI company? To this, the deeper answer would be none of the above; SpaceX is an Elon Musk company, with its main product being Elon Musk. Here, let us briefly reflect on the life and times of that remarkable African-American man, scion of an emerald mine owner, UPenn physics and economics alumni, PayPal CEO, Mars terraforming evangelist, electric vehicle visionary, and father of around fourteen. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that such a man would wind up as the funding mechanism for the United States of America, as an all-singing, all-dancing, living and breathing trillion-dollar coin...  Do you understand how much trouble we had to go through to pull this cash infusion off, without (most of) the market realising? [N.B. Musk *is*, indeed, essential to reducing federal expenses!] [N.N.B. Looks smaller-scale than expected though.] (Source: youtube.com, again; and GPT Image 2) [To be continued...]
 But circuses too - ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? [Embiggen!] [N.B. UFC Freedom 250 and UFC A.D. 250 are very similar after all!] (Source: bleacherreport.com, GPT Image 2) With the GOD-EMPEROR's Birthday Games at the Imperial Capital just successfully concluded - entirely in keeping with America's Roman legacy - his ever-victorious legions are also executing a honourable withdrawal from Persia, to regroup for further conquests. Gentlemen, if you are of the opinion that things change... I am sorry to have to say that they really don't. As for the rest of today's update, it will be a brief personal reflection on the trappings of, if not wealth, then a moderate degree of affluence. Yes, I am fully aware that it's one of those touchy subjects, but the nice thing about being willing to court controversial topics is that it only gets easier to do. In summary, I have gone from sharing a room with my grandmother to the age of around thirty-two (which, on hindsight, was perhaps not the best signal), to more or less having paid off two properties - including a detached house in Bukit Timah, since we're on disclosure. If I had been a little more aware, I should probably have just done all this earlier; if I had been a little braver, I would have just renounced. But I was neither, so here we are. That said, I can't say that my life or habits have changed much. One of the greatest switchups from my younger self would be a reliance on private-hire vehicles (i.e. basically Grab) instead of public transport, which is more for saving time than any rejection of the latter. This might be a little sensitive, however, from how I recently absentmindedly asked an acquaintance whether he would like a ride (which I should perhaps have gotten earlier too), or take the bus - even the suggestion appears to have some implications, which I would honestly not have realised in my more innocent days.  Entirely sufficient [N.B. And multifunctional in a pinch too!] [N.N.B. That said, I'm considering the TRUMP Mugshot Collectible, containing a piece of the (Source: linkedin.com) Other than this, there's the accrual of credit card points, which I had never really bothered about, but I can well understand why people bother after experiencing business class seats for the first time* - being able to lie down for long haul flights does make the trip far more enjoyable. Oh, and there was a passing interest in watches - this being the only conventional accessory a guy is allowed - to the extent of attending a horological event, and compiling a list of potential acquisitions. If one takes the main function of a watch as being to tell time, however, it was all entirely meaningless. Firstly, about everyone has a smartphone nowadays, which has more computing power than the entire world had about 1980, and as such is capable of keeping time as synchronized from the best atomic clocks too. Barring that, the ubiquitous Casio F-91W is rated as accurate within half a minute per month - but possibly far better - lasts basically forever under normal conditions, and costs like twenty bucks. Upgrade to a solar G-Shock for two hundred dollars, and I daresay one's lifetime timekeeping needs are solved, casual dives up to a hundred fathoms included, especially since one's arm probably won't survive anything the watch doesn't anyway. But fine, it's fun to shake the Tag up once in a while, though I doubt I'll ever play the Authorized Dealer game to get dibs on a Rolex... and if you guys ever see me dual-wielding Pateks, you have my permission to smack me. And yes, on food. While I do think everybody should have the opportunity to visit Michelin-starred restaurants once in a while, and one can hardly fault their attention to detail and general put-togetherness as a class, it does get old rather quickly; usually, I'm entirely satisfied with getting my tummy (mostly) filled, and it can get awkward when the waiter introduces the lobster in such an intimate manner that one gets the feeling of having known it for a long time...  Do I need anything? Yes, lady, please stop blocking the light [N.B. After which he "borrowed" some cash to tip the showgirls.] (Source: instagram.com) In the end, I'd say that the true value of wealth is freedom... which includes the ability to do or say stuff without caring overly what others think of it. Sometimes, one just really wants to sit on the floor (or the grass), you know? [*On this, our Health Minister has apparently gotten a bit of blowback for flying First Class to Tokyo on official business, all the more after the DPM was reportedly in business class (and a car), and the Prime Minister and Senior Minister on budget airlines - but to be frank, it would be pointless to risk having them in nonoptimal condition for negotiations etc.] [To be continued...]
 Gotta keep one's post-Presidency employment options open [N.B. See Seedance video from March.] (Source: deadline.com) Following up on recent blog posts before World Cup season, we have the Iranian president reportedly offering his resignation due to not actually being in power (as asserted here in April), BYD sanctioned by America together with Alibaba, Baidu and a host of other Chinese firms due to supposedly being closely linked to the PRC military (with some implications of BYD's manufacturing dominance covered in the previous post), the U.S. now citing "self-defense" in striking Iran (ref. Hoppers) and their Secretary of State noting that Greenland only remained part of Denmark "for now"... though that last might be stretching coincidences a little too far. On Singapore, the latest Imperial Tariff rate appears to have been set at 12.5% due to not complying with (America's) international law on banning goods produced with forced labour, which may apply to one-third of local exports to them. About this, one personally reckons it far cleaner were the U.S. simply to announce that they are imposing tariffs to try and balance their trade deficit - which everybody sort of does anyway - rather than bother with contriving excuses. Foreign Affairs has in any case just attributed yuan undervaluation as a major source of said imbalances for Team Blue, with The Economist foreseeing an inevitable trade war between Europe and China. This was of course long posited as a likely consequence of the American tariffs last September by way of the Chickencoop Principle, with the world other than America necessarily having to eat larger deficits were the U.S. to reduce theirs - and Europe is indeed bearing the brunt of China's excess export capacity, leading to the German Chancellor proposing tougher trade measures; so much for free trade orthodoxy then, when you're not winning! Chinese officials have for their part been a broken record on repeating that they do not aim for a trade surplus, while (correctly) attributing such to China's moving up the value ladder, with some sniping at Europe's refusal to export advanced equipment like lithography machines - though frankly, it won't be long before China corners that market too, if they did.  Winner, winner, chicken dinner! (Source: mangatown.com) Anyway, China Daily has acknowledged the Chickencoop Principle in their own way by (accurately) stating that "...the notion that all economies can simultaneously enjoy trade surpluses is mathematically impossible" (i.e. we are certainly not going to be the suckers on running an aggregate trade deficit), but this neglects that all economies can theoretically run balanced trade with near-zero surpluses or deficits, following the old wisdom of "neither a borrower nor a lender be". As it is, Western manufacturing potential and expertise is withering away - with consequences to be explained very soon. Singapore has not been spared in the ongoing (if largely underadvertised) trade wars, what with rebadged mattresses from China coming under scrutiny, and local banks taking a beating on China's new regulations on outbound wealth flows. While one can't knock the government's initiative on seeking a free trade agreement with eight East African countries, this doesn't look like it will cover a fraction of the loss in trade were the big boys (i.e. Great America and China mostly) to impose themselves. Our long-suffering DPM Gan has received some relief in the form of some 1000 much-needed jobs from U.S. semiconductor firm Applied Materials*, a rare carrot in the current era of enthusiastic American stick-wielding that may warrant a sincere "thank you" to the reigning GOD-EMPEROR. It bears repeating that it does appear a seriously tough era to be a minister (or comparably highly-placed in the Singapore government), to the extent that one feels it only decent to tone down on the kopitiam-style criticism**, despite my naturally-contrarian sensibilities. The Defence Minister had for instance been panned for continually referring to his script in his address at the Shangri-La Dialogue plenary, but it does make sense to be extra careful about exactly what one says*** in an official capacity (well, unless you're GEOTUS), in the currently-tense geopolitical climate. Likewise for the comments on a Senior Minister of State for Manpower and Health returning to surgical practice, after originally resigning for family reasons - there might well be a net increase in his contribution to society there! Unto Elon AI, As Unto AdonAI just look at the people He gives it to." - Dorothy Parker [N.B. She might know a bit about that, being born a Rothschild.]  Maybe not *quite* richer than God... but the comparison is understandable (Source: GPT Image 2) The bumper SpaceX IPO from several days ago has provided a convenient staging point for the (macro)economics discussion to follow, beginning with how the offering of about 4.3% of the outstanding SpaceX stock at US$150 (up from US$135) on Nasdaq implied a company valuation of about US$2 trillion - which made founder Elon Musk the world's first U.S. dollar trillionaire. About a year ago, an interactive visualization of Bezos' wealth (US$139 billion then) had made some waves online for illustrating how humongous even a single billion is, and an update may be in order given how Musk is now wealthier than the next four multi-billionaires (Bezos now in fourth) combined. Perhaps more remarkably, Musk is also richer than approximately the poorest half of the global population (46%, to be exact), which comes to, oh, 3.8 billion people. This fact obviously makes absolutely no sense. Now, Elon Musk may be a pretty smart and accomplished fellow, a magnificent autist, and the world's top Diablo 4 player to boot, but has he really done as much for the world as roughly half of all living humans? This is a rhetorical question, by the way, to which the only resolution appears that money is not a very good measure of one's contributions; in fairness to Musk, he does have quite a lot of those in various domains, just perhaps not to the tune of a trillion bucks... but we will return to possible reasons soon. Perhaps he might consider reimbursing the local elderly lady who had spotted him six hundred grand in his hour of need? Switching now to the (inter)national level, one trillion U.S. dollars is also larger than the annual GDP of all but twenty-one countries (Poland being the twenty-first, with either Taiwan or Ireland next depending on one's sympathies), every one of which Singapore wants to be friends with, according to our economics-trained**** PM at the SPC Eminent Speaker Series, along with a call for national cohesion amidst "mutually assured disruption" between the U.S. and China. This apparently includes Russia, where he will be visiting for high-level talks in a few days, which may seem problematic for Singapore's supposed "principles" on the surface given their invasion of Ukraine - but then, pragmatism is a principle too.  What was the first cause here? (Source: x.com) And back to the implications of Musk's trillion dollars. As a reminder, Musk didn't sell SpaceX for a trillion (and change); he sold about 4% of the company, while owning about 46%. His fortune, then, is derived by extrapolating the per-share cost of the actually-bought shares, to the remainder of the stock. Clearly, if Musk were to attempt to divest all of his 46% on the open market, this would move the share price (almost certainly for the worse), resulting in a reduced amount of cold, hard cash. To further illustrate this issue with valuations, let us try a little game, for which you would need a trusted† friend (or pet) and a notepad. Firstly, create ten trillion NotePadCoins by tearing out two pages of the notepad, and writing "5 trillion NPCs" on each page. Rest assured, there's (probably) no law against this - call them "tokens" if you have to. Next, gift 5 trillion NPCs to your friend, while retaining 5 trillion NPCs for yourself. Finally, trade a dollar for one of your friend's NPCs. Now, from known market valuations, each of you own assets worth approximately five trillion U.S. dollars on paper, if admittedly with minor concerns about liquidity, so don't go wild with purchasing yachts just yet! This so happens to be basically Musk's favourite joke on two economists consuming poop to goose the GDP, and also describes the non-fungible token (NFT) craze/scam circa 2021 (remember them?), which has concluded with nearly all NFTs being next to worthless, Exhibit A being Justin Bieber's Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT that went from US$1.2 million in 2022, to (maybe) US$12000 today. To clarify, the mechanism seems fairly straightforward: NFT creators and insiders just listed and (re-)sold the NFTs for astronomical prices between themselves, as easily as one might trade paper NotePadCoins with one's pals (or pets). The real profit is made only when it circulates to an outsider/sucker, who injects actual funds into the ecosystem.  And he saith unto them - whose is this image and superscription? [N.B. Just in case it wasn't obvious enough...] (Source: nypost.com) And finally, for the main realization and hypothesis, consider some American monetary history. While the concept of a trillion perhaps first came to the fore of their public consciousness in 1981, when the national debt first crossed that mark, there had been a revival in late 2012, when the idea of minting a trillion-dollar coin to bypass the debt ceiling was floated by the Democrats, apparently with support from Krugman, The Economist and the New York Times. This possibility had regained attention in recent years from Rashida Tlaib and other congresspeople for funding purposes, and the conclusion seems to be that the Treasury does have every legal right to mint such a coin by the Coinage Act... as long as it is made of platinum. From another perspective, the minting is somewhat superfluous - the Fed can (and has) just perform Quantitative Easing (QE) by buying assets in open market operations. There are some differences, however, in that the U.S. Treasury would theoretically have (fairly broad) oversight over how to spend the spanking new one trillion dollars that just appeared in their deposit account at the Federal Reserve (effectively via Modern Monetary Theory). This would be expected to go towards paying down the debt by redeeming bonds, though the Treasury has bought currencies and equities in exceptional situations, such as for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008. Both the trillion-dollar coin minting and regular QE have some major drawbacks, however. Specifically, a trillion-dollar coin would very obviously be "printing money", while QE relies on transmission through banks by lending (and creditors through borrowing), which may be ineffective if one or both remain unwilling (i.e. "pushing on a string"). Both are moreover likely to erode confidence in the U.S. dollar, in the longer run. The "proper" way then is to borrow via issuing Treasury bonds (debt) and/or tax the citizenry, but the former is getting out of control, and the latter won't keep a party in government for long.  World's richest man? You mean my butler? (Source: youtube.com) So we come to: if just printing money one way or the other is no good, allocation through the banks is unreliable, borrowing is unaffordable, and taxation entirely unpopular... how about manufacturing a useful craze in technology (yes, and artificial intelligence, for which a "circular economy" has been observed for some months now), and encouraging domestic organizations and consumers to Approachable video explainer [*They might hopefully give some consideration to locals, from how a recent recruitment drive for Micron Singapore reportedly explicitly invited only Malaysians to apply.] [**For example, I was considering penning a rebuttal against the proposed increase in ministerial salaries in February, only to realize that I had, to my shame, not been making less than them for the past decade or so, perhaps those with multiple portfolios and serendipitous property windfalls excepted. Given this, it just felt entirely hypocritical to complain, now all the more as the raise has been shelved due to Hormuz senjata.] [***This includes on recent anti-Indian social media posts, which the Law Minister was careful to state that there was no evidence to suggest that they were part of a coordinated campaign by any government, despite likely originating from a China-based platform. As said last month, China probably has a lot to learn about effective propaganda ops anyway.] [****Which extends to the "stylish retro mullet", as referenced in our explanation of the Grocery Store Analogy from last year.] [†Or not-so-trusted; it doesn't really matter.] [To be continued...]
- Cool Hand Luke 22, on bluffing Words (As Numbers)  I think our chatbots are getting along! (Source: GPT Image 2) Before explaining my answer to the cliffhanger question at the end of the previous post, on whether the United States of America can retain its long-held primacy without their President's current policies, a brief comment on LLMs such as ChatGPT and Gemini. While perhaps still occasionally prone to gross factual errors (on which more next time), I think it fair to say that their expositions are, on the whole, no less good than the average human adult, and certainly near-impeccable in technical execution, if perhaps somewhat recognizable in tone. This consistency and blandness in A.I. voice does make them especially suited to formal and commercial contexts - including but not limited to boilerplate news articles and advertising copy - and public communication in general. If nothing else, major chatbots have been tuned to be entirely sycophantic and inoffensive, channelling that preppy pal that just "fits in" and gets accepted about anywhere, like a platinum credit card. There has to be a temptation, then, of simply augmenting one of those open-source LLMs using RAG on previous blog posts, for effort-free content generation. Were approval by the widest possible readership the objective, one could do far worse. But that was never the point, was it? Ladies and gentlemen, before proceeding, I offer contrition for any ill-feeling from the suggestion that America may well not remain First; but perhaps the fact that mere words could engender such repugnance, indicates that "America First" is indeed a status taken for granted by Americans and their supporters. Oh, they may badmouth their politicians (quite eagerly, as it happens), complain about taxes and the cost of living, and readily admit to ongoing crises of healthcare and infrastructure and random warmongering - but when push comes to shove, one believes that a majority of them will still assert that yes, America is still the Greatest Nation on Earth. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, in the sense that most everyone believes that their parents are (among) the best parents, their football team is the best football team (or should be anyway, had the management not messed it all up), and their dog is the bestest boy of all. Returning to a more-neutral perspective, however, I would have to say that whether America can remain First, by the quantitative metrics that matter, has at least become a valid question. To this, I boldly add the claim that TRUMP is by and large operating to preserving America's position - as we shall soon see. Population  You didn't actually think it would work a second time, did you? (Source: GPT Image 2) The key point raised in the previous blog post was that a country's Strength correlates strongly with its population, particularly over the longer term. Historically, consider the greatest empire directly preceding America*, that of the British. At its height about 1913, it contained some 23% of the global population, much of that attributable to the British Raj in and around India, which numbered some 315 million people then. Do note that the focus on China's population advantage is not because I happen to be ethnically Chinese (or at least I was, last I checked this morning); this will likely apply for India too, sometime in the future. However, since China's GDP is currently about 2.3 (PPP) to 4.7 (nominal) times that of India's, it may be some years before America's baleful gaze turns on them. Before Britain, the title of First (in Europe at least) had been carried by the French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese in turn, going by reserve currency status - and it is perhaps no fluke that all of these powers were supported by burgeoning (often colonial) populations. Much of America had been French, after all, the Dutch controlled present-day Indonesia (the fourth most-populous nation after India, China and the U.S.) as recently discussed, and the Spanish and Portuguese (later combined for extra Strength) conquered much of the Americas (yes, again), including Macau (in China) for good measure. Right before them, there were the Mongols, who like the British controlled about a quarter of everybody living, aided by a willingness to transfer dissenters to the other side of that ledger. With this understanding, the drive towards expansion by the reigning GOD-EMPEROR of America is self-explanatory. As the Chinese probably understand better than most, "alliances" are often unreliable, and one can only count vassals and actual subjects under one's true Strength. Towards the former, TRUMP has contributed Venezuela and maybe Cuba to come, with expansion targeted for Greenland, Canada (with an Alberta secession referendum already arranged) and southwards as well. All this is not even remarkable in a historical context, mind, especially if purchase (as proposed for Greenland) is considered - just ask Britain, France, Spain, Mexico and Russia. To put it another way before moving on to the next point, the eclipse of a smaller entity by a larger one would be entirely expected, in the general sense; one might read about Qin conquering the other contenders during the Warring States period due to being larger and more centralised (especially compared to the comparably-large but fragmented Chu), and shrug because that's how it usually goes. David beats Goliath qualifies as news, exactly because it is so rare; ninety-nine times out of a hundred, "kid gets brutalized by trained warrior" doesn't get recorded, because as the Romans well knew**, slingers and velites simply aren't a match for triarii. [*Here, let us confirm that America is an Empire in no uncertain terms, and by all indications the greatest one that the world has yet seen. When one has over five thousand nukes and perhaps seven hundred foreign outposts/bases, one tends to set the rules, and therefore the "rule-based order" (which our Foreign Minister apparently preferred over "international law" during his visit to China - who're skipping the Shangri-La Dialogue again)] [**The Iranian foreign ministry has just drawn allusions to how the Roman Emperor came to terms with the Persians in the third century, thus acknowledging the GOD-EMPEROR's pedigree.] Numbers (In Green)  What took an actual World War before... (Source: livewiremarkets.com) The sheer preposterousness of American advisers, and much of their general citizenry, claiming that "(national) debt and (aggregate) trade deficits don't matter" had been addressed last September, but it is unclear as to whether any minds had been changed, given that the national debt remains increasing at a clip of some US$2.25 trillion annually - which may soon have to be refinanced at higher rates. Seriously, one has totally no idea as to how these conceptions about debt and deficits had become popular. That said, America has always been able to roll their borrowings over up to now, and are of course able to simply print money to pay it up in the worst case, thanks to Nixon abandoning the gold standard. It should be said that no fiat currency has sustained such free-spending indefinitely either, though, and this is not for lack of trying. On the persistent aggregate trade deficit front, China may indeed have something to answer for, given their record trade surplus of nearly US$1.2 trillion from last year, which roughly matches America's annual deficit. Such surplus-hogging has been customary for China, with the Qing Dynasty for example running up a huge silver surplus with Europe through the 16th to 18th centuries, thanks to their constant exports of goods such as tea, silk and porcelain - while importing next to nothing in return. Given an inability to print or mine more of this rare metal (also mirrored today), this had the British push opium on China to balance their trade deficit, which ended poorly. The above, then, explains the GOD-EMPEROR TRUMP's unprecedented Global Imperial Tariffs from last April, to which half the world bent the knee to by August (this just reaffirmed by the European Union), and which remain largely in effect despite some implementation hiccups. This led to the lowest monthly deficit in over fifteen years last October, though a more-permanent adjustment may be some time in coming, no thanks to an uncooperative judiciary - who aren't the ones paying the bills to come, by the way.  Pandemic and shutdowns, we hardly knew ye! [N.B. That rising debt may have summat to do with this.] (Source: stlouisfed.org) Even the spectacle of America's post-pandemic GDP soaring against China's might not be as rosy as it appears. Firstly, the other leg of TRUMP's tariff intentions was to bring (some) manufacturing back to the United States, which will definitely take time to come into effect. Jobs aside, it may be often missed that the ability to actually make things, has and always remains a keystone of a country's Strength in practice. America's near-total abandonment of their shipbuilding capacity had been noted last December, and while the current plan is to lean on allies such as Japan and South Korea, an obvious concern is that there are no permanent allies; what if, faced by pressure from perhaps North Korea and others, South Korea then decides to exercise their sovereign right to cancel external orders? And to cap it off, China's GDP by purchasing power parity (i.e. actual goods and services as-is) is already almost half again as large as America's (US$43.5T to US$31.8T), which makes the corresponding gulf in nominal terms rather questionable. To explain this in more concrete and relatable terms, consider the Tesla Model 3 (about US$38k in America) to the roughly-equivalent BYD Seal (about US$15k in China). This means that for the same money, one can get either one car in America, or 2.5 cars in China. Now, let us say that Tesla makes (and sells) ten thousand cars in America, and BYD does twenty thousand cars in China. In this case, American nominal GDP from car sales would be about 20% higher... but China would have twice the number of cars in actuality! While Redditors have for some reason been quite adamant about nominal GDP being the more appropriate measure (as opposed to PPP) for international trade and superpower status determination purposes, let's just say that I wouldn't want to be an admiral staring down a fleet that's some three times larger, while holding a certified missive assuring that our fleet was however bought (much) more expensively. Indeed, one gets the feeling that China has not been eager to disabuse the U.S. of this (twisted) notion either, for instance by generally keeping the yuan undervalued against the U.S. dollar within their managed float, with recent estimates being that it remains over 20% undervalued. This in turn implies that were China simply to allow the yuan to appreciate to equilibrium, its nominal GDP would also rise about 20% against America as a result, immediately snuffing out much of the latter's supposed lead. Energy  Well, well - bystanders no more? (Source: businesstimes.com.sg) As explained in April, Hormuz was quite possibly partly a means to get America's erstwhile "allies" to experience getting their own hands dirty (in principle similar to the "head tax" imposed by various enforcement organizations), and from how the U.S. almost seems to be trolling on the Iranian peace deal (re: a US$300 billion reconstruction fund), they may well be happy to drag it out until July to get NATO involved, and restore some balance to the one-sided alliance. It took TRUMP bringing the hammer down to get the freeloaders to take their own defence more seriously, and thus finally distributing a responsibility that Europe was delighted to have America bear mostly alone - with Spain getting called out after recent approaches to China. The U.S. naval blockade of Hormuz remains very much in place, and from how the Chinese Premier has just been inspecting*** their strategic oil and grain stockpiles, one figures that America may well have some secondary aims in mind. While China has been reported to be sitting on the world's largest petroleum reserves, their quantity is not officially reported (unlike for Australia). From a conference I attended several years ago, there has been ongoing research on estimating petroleum inventories using satellites, which may be quite relevant given how indispensible oil remains to military operations. Is the oil there, or is it not? Well, some countries will attempt to keep a brave face for as long as they can... [***Necessary, from how fuel had been siphoned off and replaced by water previously, an old dodge indeed.] At Once Lion And Lamb And we return to the Man, the King of Kings. And ask a question: can one man truly do, all that he has been said to have done? America has over three hundred million souls, after all; why is it then that they seem satisfied to shift responsibility to but one of their number? He built a wall; He raised the tariffs; He bullied NATO, snatched a President, started the wars; that has to be a very busy and capable man indeed! On this, the answer is much the same as that great Story, from two thousand years ago. Then, there was another man, a Lion, a Lamb, a Scapegoat who assumed the sins of his fellows, a Lord who was sacrificed; he did what had to be done, though those he saved would not admit it; they would instead gladly crucify him for it, entirely unaware of the gift they had received. Blame him, and receive Salvation by his hand - that America might yet be First, and Greatest, for a little longer...  ...that he gave his favourite† and most stably genius son (Source: ebay.co.uk; also in his version of the Good Book; perhaps illegal) [†Fine, so he made a few billion extra in the process, but to him who has more will be given and all that - unlike previous less-entrepreneurial holders of the office. This is a virtue that congresspeople are picking up on.] "No, they know not what you do for them." [To be continued...]
I do not even know where to start." - applicable to many mainstream media analyses of geopolitics  They indeed toll for thee! (Source: facebook.com) The on-again, off-again Hormuz senjata has seen Iran and Oman reportedly now considering setting up a permanent toll, if under the legal dodge of imposing them as a fee for services rendered, specifically the extremely important service of choosing not to blow transiting ships up. While U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has indicated that a toll would make a diplomatic deal infeasible, it is frankly not very clear as to whether calling it a fee would make the business more palatable, from how he apparently acquiesced to China's transcription hack in bypassing extant sanctions. From a local angle, the immediate concern would be how a potential toll-called-fee would reflect on Singapore's sticking our neck out on refusing to pay one, with our Foreign Minister's tête-à-tête with his Iranian counterpart seemingly not having the intended effect. It might be a difficult time to be a minister here, one fears, with a DPM getting panned for not achieving an essentially-impossible task as previously explained, amidst questioning of so-called "economic strategy" alongside high costs and ongoing AI-based layoffs. The CEO of Standard Chartered did apologize after being knocked by our former President, amongst (some) others, for referring to replaced employees as "lower value human capital", but this notably did not affect the reality of workers being retrenched nonetheless. More bending of "international law" continued with India for example rejecting a ruling by the Hague-based Court of Arbitration, in what appears to increasingly be a choose-your-own-authority scenario for nations, as with the effective rejection of the ICC (and ICJ, for that matter) by Singapore. Despite our Senior Minister's typically-neutral-coded comments from his recent (budget) visit to Shanghai, one can only hope that our leaders have not promised some of the same thing to both Team Red and Team Blue (i.e. rehypothecation, in the financial context), and thus left one or the other party with less than they thought had been agreed to. A Ripoff Of Understanding "Son, don't you know that the dime is worth more than the nickel, despite it being smaller in size?" "Well, if I took the dime, the game would be over!"  An objective assessment of what's going on [N.B. With compliments to Google Nano Banana and GPT Image 2.] Returning to sacrifices and The Greatest Game proper, let us set the stage by recounting a couple of high-profile domestic scams from the past month. In the first, a 75 year-old lady gave S$600,000 over three years, to Elon Musk impersonators who convinced her that he needed her to help save his businesses, after also introducing her to TRUMP and Mark Zuckerberg. The victim in the second case lost nearly five million dollars, this time because our Prime Minister supposedly approached him requesting urgent funding assistance, due to the Hormuz crisis. As it happened, our PM didn't (who could have thought?!) Less-than-salutary online comments have tended to focus on how these scamees had managed to amass such fortunes while being so bereft of judgment and common sense, but the realisation here should be that people are generally only too easily swayed by peer pressure and compliance to groupthink, even where no internal consistency is to be had. A gross overestimation of one's own competency may also play a role, perhaps best exemplified by potbellied spectators yelling after a missed basket or goal that they could do better. The great irony here, then, is that intelligent readers will quite likely concede the above points... while possibly stubbornly holding on to the (standard mainstream media) viewpoint that TRUMP actually doesn't know what he is doing, and that his decisions and moves thus far are not part of some complex 5D chess scheme; because, come to think of it, Tesla isn't doing that well leading into the SpaceX IPO... perhaps Musk (net worth: over US$700 billion) does need a spare few hundred grand to tide him over in the meantime?  No really, it will pass this time! (Source: malaymail.com) But perhaps such is the genius of TRUMP, that he can repeatedly riff off the same playbook, and have his foes steadfastly refuse to admit that they have been had (again); put it this way, Cao Cao only managed to pull off the false promise of an upcoming plum grove just once, to get his troops to march onwards to the river. For TRUMP, this is basically right after every stock market close nowadays - and it's still working! All this is probably in service of a greater mission, however. On this, let us refer to a pair of commentaries in The New York Times, that were published immediately before and after POTUS had visited China. While the liberal NYT can hardly be accused of being a fan of TRUMP, they would be uniformly dismissive of China's potential in their opinion pieces, describing the PRC as "much weaker than they seem" and "not rising for (much) longer". In this, the eminent Gray Lady reflects "America First", if perhaps not in the active TRUMPIAN sense that is denounced by Democrats and Washington D.C. career politicos; instead, this is "America First" in the possessive, not as a prize to be won or a title to be sought, but as an inherited birthright that brooks no debate. America is First - in peace and war. This attitude is entirely understandable, by the way. America has been near-universally recognized as the premier superpower of the world since the crumbling of the old empires at the end of World War II some eighty years past, and the only superpower upon outlasting the Soviet Union about thirty-five years ago. Very few of the living remember it any other way. Before continuing, allow me to admit to being a great admirer of the U.S.A. - like so many others - for all their accomplishments past and present. This includes air travel, the Internet, the WWE, and of course the Pax Americana, a near-unprecedented period of global peace and prosperity, barring some unhappy outliers such as being Vietnamese in the 1960s, or Iraqi in 1991/2003. But will America be First for much longer?  A receding target? [N.B. China looked well on track to surpass the U.S., until the well-timed Covid pandemic tanked their progress wholesale, to a 4.5% growth target.] (Source: economist.com) In his May 12th op-ed, Stephens kicks off with the bold claim that China's economy would most likely never overtake America's, much as previous contenders such as the Soviet Union, Japan and the European Union had failed. This is hardly an original assertion, but slightly odd in some respects. Firstly, it is unsure as to whether the E.U. had ever truly considered themselves an economic rival; secondly, China had the largest economy in the world as recently as two centuries ago, with America hardly a blip on the chart then; and thirdly, the writer had - probably wilfully - neglected the elephant in the room: China's population is over four times that of America's. The Soviet Union, for all their boogeyman cred during the First Cold War, had a population roughly comparable to the U.S. through its peak and dissolution. Japan's population never exceeded about half of America's. As such, to overhaul America in economic Strength, these two would have had to (significantly) surpass them in per-capita GDP. The European Union had actually exceeded the U.S. in terms of nominal GDP for brief periods, while being roughly equal in purchasing parity power terms, but this was never particularly meaningful given that the E.U. is composed of very many sovereign states, each with their own motivations and objectives. China, in contrast to all of the above, is a single, unified country - and moreover one that only needs to hit 25% of America's per-capita GDP to match them, a benchmark attained by Cuba, Latvia, Barbados and Saint Kitts & Nevis, among others. This uncomfortable fact has led to Western Team Blue pundits consoling themselves about China's demographic trends, as Douthat then does in his May 16th piece on China's crashing fertility rate. To wit: "Just how confident can Chinese people really be in their culture's future if the rising generation is so disinclined to reproduce*? Just how confident should China's leaders be that they can outlast the United States if their population could be cut in half over the next few generations?" This however may neglect that current projections would have China's working age (not total) population declining... to over 600 million by 2060, or still about twice America's current total. The mainline narrative on China's economic troubles is seemingly being amplified by non-Chinese thinktanks and pundits, with even usual apologist Kishore Mahbubani recently claiming that the U.S. lead over them would only widen, alongside projections of India's forthcoming demographic rise. All this however glosses over some fundamental inconsistencies and problematic assumptions, chief amongst them being that the average worker in China will, for some reason, never be more than about a quarter as productive as his American counterpart (about this, OECD estimates the figure to be near 60% by 2035). It is a great irony, then, that any suggestion of ethnic disparities would be entirely racist and verboten in American universities... whose politically-correct international relations experts would then effectively swear blind that Chinese citizens can never match up to Americans output-wise, in their public theses. Something doesn't quite add up.  Will get around to them someday [Embiggen!] Here, one important observation might be made. While there has been a surplus of popular and academic literature insinuating ulterior motives by China in their developmental process, such as Doshi's The Long Game above, or Pillsbury's The Hundred-Year Marathon, it might be recognized that the actual issue is China's raw scale. In particular, it is difficult to brand "catching up with Lithuania's per-capita GDP of about US$30000" as some particularly malevolent strategy... but for that China would all but indisputably dethrone America as the world's leading superpower, from having about 150% America's aggregate nominal GDP, if they achieved that. This then implies that there is basically no way for China to not be recognized as a geopolitical threat by America, bar complete stagnation. But what about the authoritarian and oppressive (at least in Team Blue's telling) CCP, then? Unfortunately, one believes that China's governing philosophy is not the primary concern either, and that most of the antagonism would remain even were the CCP to be replaced by a democratic system (as hinted by our 20 year-old comic). The justification derives from America's treatment of post-war Japan, who were undeniably democratic - heck, America designed Japan's government themselves! None of this precluded America's hostile intent towards Japan when the latter drew close in economic terms in the 1980s, which was only resolved when Japan fell off the radar soon after. Having established the above facts and considerations, a natural question presents itself: if GEOTUS TRUMP is not doing what he is doing, can America remain First in the world? My short and perhaps bitter answer is: probably not. [*An argument that happens to apply to most of the developed, Western and democratic world too.] [To be continued...]
 的确是漫天浓雾，当真是新时代的起始! [N.B. The banner appears changed from "sacrifice" to "prayer", as perhaps expected for our more-modern sensibilities.] (Sources: manhuagui.com, reuters.com) Digressing to more-mundane concerns, the appropriateness of the recent description of TRUMP and Xi as Emperors and Heroes would be made manifest by the carefully-curated symbolism surrounding their reunion in Beijing. Foremost amongst these was their visit to the Temple of Heaven, historically the private preserve of the reigning Emperor, and from whence he renewed his Mandate of Heaven - coincidentally, one that both these men currently hold, over their respective domains. The GOD-EMPEROR TRUMP would then be further honoured with a personal invitation to the (former) Imperial garden at Zhongnanhai, much as Cao Cao hosted Liu Bei all those years ago (if with tea the choice of drink instead, not least due to GEOTUS's personal habits). And just in case the implication was missed, Xi would confirm to TRUMP that (almost) only Tsar Putin had been received here, in a nod towards the forthcoming Three And, just because mainstream media journalists nowadays tend to be exceedingly dense on recognizing viewpoints not sanctioned by their paymasters, President Xi would very kindly host Tsar Putin less than a week after TRUMP to drum home the point, because it wouldn't be "Three Kingdoms" without the third party; that the protocol was essentially the same as for TRUMP - as befitting their shared status as Emperors by another name - should not be missed either. Moreover, for China and Xi, this arrangement would project the unsaid statement that the Middle Kingdom had returned to its rightful place at the centre of the world, to which other states and entities paid due tribute.  虽各为其主，但今时今日，咱们还是朋友！ [N.B. If with the CEO of Nvidia a late addition to the lineup.] (Source: thestandard.com.hk) Make no mistake, though - despite the amicable exchanges, all signals are that the Emperors may be The sparring would not take long to commence after TRUMP's departure, with his first gambit being a warning to Taiwan against declaring independence, then suggesting that both China and Taiwan should cool tensions, while refusing to confirm if America would intervene were Taiwan to be invaded. The Taiwanese foreign ministry would immediately declare in response that they are a "sovereign and independent democratic nation", which must have had TRUMP giggling at how easily he had instigated Taiwan to declare their independence, while outwardly being against it and currying favour with Xi. Cao Cao would have been proud! Being a bit dim in this case, Taiwan would only realise what had happened and belatedly clarify that they "would not provoke conflict" several days later, but this little prank appears to only confirm that they are not on the same level as GOD-EMPEROR TRUMP, in matters of grand strategy. TRUMP would in any case continue by describing Taiwan as a "good negotiating chip" (which, let's face it, they kind of are). This chip is being moved, by the way, with GEOTUS granting the Taiwanese president an audience, after Xi and Putin released a joint statement accusing the U.S. and Israel of illegal attacks on Iran (which it kind of is), certainly something of a snub after TRUMP had courted them on delegitimising the International Criminal Court. International law may be getting complicated, folks!  But half a million fee-paying students is alright [N.B. This comes alongside visa sanctions after China's alleged slowing repatriation of their undocumented migrants, and spying concerns.] (Source: manhuagui.com) [To be continued...]
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