Wait, archive.is is considered infamous? First I’ve heard of that descriptor

For comparison, China, the second largest silver producer, has an output around half of that of Mexico.

Mexico is the largest producer of silver, with nearly 25% of global production. They are also in the top ten producers of gold, copper, zinc and lithium.

Yep, just build more datacenters while gutting renewable energy. What a perfect plan!

Sometimes we need to remember that liberals generally see the world through vibes rather than any coherent ideological framework. When it’s a friendly country, they would call it foresight and comparative advantage. When it’s China they would call it government overreach and overcapacity. Their judgement isn’t consistent, and it isn’t meant to be. It’s much easier to manipulate public opinion and justify the next war when the people can root for/against something without needing to know why.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/10/10/large-scale-pv-has-positive-environmental-effect-on-desert-areas/

Even better, you can literally slap a bunch of them in the desert and improve the soil quality and plant diversity. It’s a great way to fight desertification for no additional effort.

Solar is really the star of the show. It is getting incredibly cheap, increasingly automated, and are expected to last 30-40 years while retaining >80% generation capacity. Funnily enough, the US is losing in this area to India. They aren’t even trying to compete with China at this point.

It’s so unfortunate that so much of the software we rely on is unmodifiable, inscrutable code running on some company’s servers. It really does not inspire confidence in their reliability and long term dependability, especially how they can just axe the project if they don’t feel it’s profitable enough. Open source should be the way to go. Ideally, it should be the bare minimum.

What I really appreciate with China’s AI approach is their focus on open source models and frameworks, and their emphasis on practical AI applications. That’s why almost all of the top open source models (Deepseek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi), are all from China, which means anyone with enough hardware can run it on their own devices.

I’m really excited for sodium-ion batteries to mature. Sodium is much more plentiful and less harmful to acquire than lithium, with near limitless amounts of it in the crust and the oceans. They also operate in a broader temperature range and can theoretically last for even more cycles. The only real downside is its lower energy density, which is improving and isn’t too important for grid-scale storage. Scale is really the biggest issue right now, and fortunately scaling up is something China is quite good at doing.